25-Hour Energy Drink

Birthday parties for three-year-olds are exhausting. So is moderating certain comment threads. So it’s nice to get a chance to sit back and read Joe McCulloch’s always entertaining, always informative field-report on the Week in Comics. (In this edition, Joe smuggles in a review of the new Judge Dredd adaptation, which I meant to bring up at some point in the blog myself, since I felt a little bad for mocking it briefly a few weeks back, before I watched it and discovered that it was actually a pretty solid little action movie.)

We also have the second installment of Mark Siegel’s Cartoonist’s Diary. In this one, he takes us through a day at First Second, with a few special guests.

Elsewhere on this great internet:

—First, there are two new Chris Ware interviews in anticipation of his new Building Stories, one from Calvin Reid at Publishers Weekly, and one from Teddy Jamieson at the Herald Scotland. (I get the feeling we’re going to be reading a lot of “…in a box” puns over the next few weeks.)

—Tom Spurgeon has a good long interview up with Adrian Tomine, for his new book, New York Drawings. Here he talks about the movie-review illustrations he drew for The New Yorker:

Most of those movie things I was working from very limited reference material. Most of those were done pretty much before the Internet had entered into my life in an everyday capacity. I didn’t get to see the movies. A lot of the time they would send me a Fed Ex package with a few stills from the movie. On some of them the deadline was so tight they even faxed over [laughs] photos, and I had to decipher the image on this crinkly fax paper. [Spurgeon laughs] I think if I were working that assignment now it would be a little easier, because you could type in “James Gandolfini” and find every type of image and photo of his face. The hardest ones of those when they were having me draw those were the good-looking but sort of hard to distinguish celebrities. The last one that I did was supposed to be the actor Ryan Phillippe, who I just couldn’t make look both handsome and recognizable as him. It was like I could do a caricature, but it won’t look good, or I could draw a handsome blond-haired, blue-eyed guy, but it won’t be… it was difficult. They eventually came to their senses and moved me on to other kinds of assignments. [laughs]